Ever After, and Then Some
by Hi.mi.tsu.2
Summary: A series of fics blending continuity from the book and movie versions of Howl's Moving Castle, and then extrapolating a future from that. Based on an LJ challenge community. [Spoilers for first book and movie endings]
1. 4: Not Good, Not Nice, Just Right

**Title:** Not Good, Not Nice, Just Right part 1

**Author:** himitsu

**Fandom:** Howl's Moving Castle

**Challenge # 4** - the answer to each moment is yes and the question: can you live with that?

**Length**: 3903 words / 7 pages (I need to learn to write short!)

**Disclaimer**: So not mine. Based on an odd improvised blending of book continuity and movie continuity, which have so little to do with each other that I'm really just tapdancing like mad trying to come up with something remotely plausible somewhere in the middle... spoilers for the end of both, since this takes place after the end of either. (Title slightly adapted from the Witch's song from Into the Woods. I'm really bad at titles, but this one kind of makes sense if you squint at it sideways.)

The challenge numbers I'm giving at the start of each chapter are based on the challenge numbers at the LiveJournal community lemonaftertaste. Since I want to keep this fic publishable here, I won't be posting all of the chapters here -- for example, part 2 of this one is only available on my LJ. Check my LJ table of contents (linked in my profile) for the listing of all the fic pieces in their chronological order, as opposed to the order they're written in. (Here I have to upload in written-in order, but there I can shuffle around for chronology...)

**Rating**: PG-13

* * *

He always had gotten himself into things before he thought about them, really. He knew it was the only way to keep himself from fleeing in sheer panic: if he stopped to think about it, he might well have packed up the entire castle and left, because promising her a "happily ever after" was fine and good when the sun was shining and the birds were singing and he was giddy with the thought of simply being _alive_ and, for the first time in a long while, having a reasonable chance of staying that way for some time. But when it came right down to it, he had no more idea how to go about creating a happily-ever-after for her than he did of how to be a responsible, mature, settled-down husband. And if he'd thought about it, about the enormity of what he'd just committed himself to, he would have run for his life, and he would have broken her heart in the process. And for once Howl cared more about someone else's heart than his own, which was profoundly ironic considering how very recently he'd gotten his own heart back. 

So all he could do was throw himself headlong into rebuilding the castle and festooning it with ribbons and so many flowers that even Calcifer sneezed on the fragrance and redesigning the place every two or three hours to make it a better wedding location and sending out invitations crafted of bits of dandelion down that would drift their way into the guests' hands and then skitter away, and in general keep himself far too busy to blink, let alone think, until the wedding itself was well and thoroughly over with.

He drank more than he ought to have, at the reception, and sang Welsh folksongs quite loudly and quite badly, and Calcifer sang along with him, and Michael rolled his eyes with great frequency and assured Sophie's sister that _he_ would never be as embarrassing as his intoxicated sot of a wizardly mentor when _they_ got married, which Howl was fairly sure was true, and therefore merited some ruthless teasing involving Michael's embarrassing childhood moments in order to regain some semblance of his own dignity. Since he had no dignity left after that much alcohol, Michael was sure to be in for a rough evening of it.

Sophie's stepmother and her other sister were fussing over her, crying their eyes out, one with happiness and the other with sorrow, both of them because she'd gone and married the most notoriously reprehensible wizard in all the lands, and one was certain she would live happily ever after, and the other was certain he would break her heart, and Howl truly didn't know how to live up to the one expectation and couldn't bear the thought of living down to the other, and so he found another bottle of something and opened it and tried to look for a solution in the bottom of the bottle. It wasn't there either. These bottles were obviously defective. Maybe the next one would be better.

When drunk three quarters out of his mind, Howl still had no idea how to turn himself into someone capable of giving a woman like Sophie a happily-ever-after, because no matter how he looked at it, he was still a flighty, vain, arrogant, scatterbrained coward prone to leaving papers and books and anything scattered all over the place, and he was still marrying a smart, practical, organized, down-to-earth woman who put a ridiculous amount of value on things like evicting cobwebs and cleaning dishes and putting things in places other than wherever they happened to fit on a nearby flat surface, organized by some arcane woman's system of tidiness. But when drunk three quarters out of his mind, he couldn't focus quite as well on anything, and so it didn't matter quite as much what he was looking at; so being drunk sounded like quite a reasonable solution for getting through the night, and tomorrow would have to sort itself out on its own, since he wasn't capable of thinking that far just then.

And then Calcifer gave him his wedding present. More specifically, Calcifer gave him _Sophie's_ wedding present.

"I thought you'd end up doing something like this," the little fire demon said, hovering three inches in front of his nose, and the wavering of the fire-halo around him was _really_ unfair to someone that drunk, because it gave him vertigo even when he was sitting almost perfectly still in a corner that was only rocking and swaying a little.

"Huh?" Howl managed, trying to keep focused on the little hovering starspark, in order to imitate a vague semblance of sobriety.

Calcifer heaved a huge sigh. "She doesn't deserve this, you know."

"I know," Howl said feelingly. "Believe me, I know. She certainly doesn't deserve this... nobody deserves being stuck with someone like me. You know that better than anybody... why didn't you warn her? Somebody should have warned her, and I'm far too great a coward. That makes it your fault, doesn't it?"

Calcifer rolled his eyes and huffed a little, shedding sparkles of irritation. "You know how stubborn she gets when her mind's made up."

Upon further reflection, Howl was increasingly pleased with the thought that he could pawn responsibility off on someone else. "That's it exactly! You should have stopped her for her own good. I'm going to have to reprimand you for allowing someone like Sophie to have to suffer through life married to a reprehensible coward. She's too good for that, and you owe her as much as I do, so you certainly should have stopped her before she could go through with it! So it's not my fault..."

"In case you hadn't noticed, you idiot, she loves you madly."

"I know," Howl sighed, utterly despondent. "I love her so much I'm terrified beyond the capacity for even semirational escape plans. You definitely should have stopped her. I'm useless. You know that. It's your fault. All your fault. --Calcifer, what am I going to do?"

"You," the fire demon said gruffly, "are going to learn how to be happy whether you like it or not, you twit. Truly happy. Not just flitting from flower to flower running like a mad mayfly from the thought of touching anyone who might want to touch you back. That's your 'punishment' for letting Sophie go through with marrying you, and I intend to make sure your punishment sticks."

"Why am I the one getting punished?" Howl complained, with a theatrical gesture to the heavens. "We decided this is all your fault!"

"Oh, you're not the only one getting punished," Calcifer muttered.

"I know! Poor Sophie... she doesn't deserve this... married to a fool of a coward who drinks himself insensible through sheer terror at not knowing how to give her the happily ever after he went and promised because he's such a damned liar..." Howl blinked back tears, and wondered how his wife would react to having to shovel a puddle of green slime into their wedding bed. Likely not well. "Why did you let her do this?"

"Will you just shut up and open your mouth?" Calcifer said.

"...Isn't that a bit of a technical impossibility? I mean, I--"

Unfortunately, the syllable left his mouth open long enough for Calcifer to take matters into his own hands.

The fire demon dove down his throat.

Howl gasped, shuddering with the searing, scalding pain of it; he coughed and wheezed and tried to drag air back into his fire-scorched lungs, and then put a hand over his mouth and _pushed_ Calcifer back out of his body through the front of his chest, ending up with a glowing flame cradled in his palms again. He'd half expected to see the demon glowing with his heart's blood once more, but oddly enough, Calcifer seemed to be almost green. And wobbling. Visibly.

...And Howl himself was, he realized a few moments too late, perfectly sober.

"What did you do?" he asked, a little hoarse from the lingering scorch-ache in his throat, but far less slurred than two minutes ago.

He'd never seen Calcifer hiccup before, and had to hastily dodge a burst of fire that left char marks on the wall just above his head.

"Calcifer? _What_ did you _do?_"

"Took your drunk-ness 'stead of your heart," the fire demon managed, heaving himself out of Howl's hands into the air, and wobbling his way back toward the fireplace. "Think I wanna sit down. --Except I don't have legs. --Jenkins you bastard, why don't I have legs? I want to sit down. No, I want to lie down... that looks comfy..."

Howl hastily scooped Calcifer out of the air before the fire demon could bumble into the silk-draped reception table and set the decorations on fire. He carried the unevenly green-flaring little ember back to the hearth and settled him carefully into a pile of logs, then sat beside him, exasperated.

"Calcifer..."

"Don't feel so good," Calcifer managed, huddled into the logs. "Why do you do this to yourself on purpose?"

"Because I'm an idiot, of course," Howl said wearily. "Calcifer, are you going to be all right...?"

"Go away," Calcifer said, still green. "I hurt all over. Go learn how to be happy. Go ask Sophie. She's smarter than you are. She'll help you figure it out."

"...Calcifer, I'm terrified."

"I know," the demon grumbled. "Go fake it. You're good at faking it, remember? Just act like you know what you're doing, and listen to what she says when she scolds you into not acting anymore. --Now go 'way. My head hurts. Why have I got a head to hurt when I haven't got legs to sit with? 'S not fair..."

"I'm sorry," Howl murmured, letting his fingertips trail lightly through the green-tinged flames in a rueful pat of apology.

"Good," Calcifer grunted. "You'd better be sorry. You're going to pamper me for at least a month. Lots of dry hickory. Some nice old Rhondda Trehafod coal too. And see if you can find any Cefn Coed while you're at it. --Go talk to your wife."

As he threaded his way through the room toward the white radiance of Sophie in her wedding dress and the flower-bright cluster of women around her, Howl thought ruefully, _I wonder if Calcifer learned cruelty from me or whether I learned it from him. Of _course_ I'm good at faking it -- from my beauty to my magic, faking everything is what I do best; but he didn't have to say it that bluntly... he could at least have called it a talent for improvisation or something._

But it was a party like any other, and even if Howell Jenkins had originally been a bookish and somewhat shy young man more given to flights of fancy than to interactions with the real world, the great Wizard Pendragon was known to be quite a dashing socialite. If there were women to be charmed, he'd breeze his way through it, and delay thinking of any consequenses as long as possible.

By the time the revelry had died down and they'd shooed the last of the guests into the hastily-grown guest wing, Sophie looked as drained as Howl felt; but he was being the confident and charming Wizard Pendragon for the evening, and so he gave her a glittering smile and swept her off her feet and swung her around, planting a kiss on her forehead and carrying her toward the stairs.

The shine of joy in her eyes, the way she looked up at him with only a little uncertainty and a great deal of the newly, fragilely grown faith that had given her the confidence to trust him with her heart, to trust a clumsy coward like him not to hurt her with his foolishness -- it was all completely and totally unfair. He almost wished he was still drunk, so that he wouldn't have had to notice all the confidence she had in his nearly nonexistent ability to know what to do to make her happy for the rest of her life.

It took him far longer than it should have to unfasten the row of pearl buttons at the back of her wedding dress, because his hands were shaking so badly. "Fidgety little things," he said with a laugh, glad that she couldn't see his clumsiness directly; she nodded a little, and he could see her blush even at the nape of her neck. The romantic thing to do was to kiss her there, of course, and so he did, and she made a delightful little giggle at the tickle.

It was a sure thing that his heart had been returned to him, Howl thought moodily, because the dratted thing was breaking itself already. Why on earth would she trust _him_ like this...? A notoriously unreliable, vain, cowardly skirt-chaser whose greatest talent was in lying through his teeth until he could almost but not quite believe himself...

That was the last of the dratted buttons, and she was clinging to the front of her dress and looking at the floor and blushing like mad, and Howl's mind was a roaring white blank, because he had to come up with _something_ to do next, something to please her, and nothing was suggesting itself even to the dashing Wizard Pendragon, who had never actually come into any danger of _succeeding_ in the pursuit of a woman.

There was one soft stray little curl that had escaped the pins and flowers in her hair and slipped loose to brush against the pale curve of her throat, and Howl scraped together the courage to reach one damnably shaking hand up to touch it, then to touch her.

Only then, with his hand upon her bare shoulder, did he realize that she was trembling even more desperately than he was.

"Sophie...?"

She turned to face him, with all the courage she'd held in abundance, all the courage he'd never had, and she looked up at him and her voice only broke a little when she said, "You'll have to forgive me, at least I hope you'll forgive me, but I really have no idea what I'm supposed to do in order to make you live happily ever after. I hope you don't mind too much. But I'm a quick learner and I work hard, so if you'll just tell me what it is I'm supposed to do to make you happy, I'll give it my best. --I'll try not to mind the spiders, if I can. And I'll write down where your fidgety little marks are when I'm cleaning. And... um... what else would make you happy...?"

The next thing he knew, he'd caught her up in his arms and had his face buried in the flowers in his hair, and he was laughing fit to knock them both over, hoping vainly that it didn't sound too hysterical.

"Eeep?" she squeaked, a little breathless; he suspected he was squeezing the breath out of her, and tried to loosen his hold a little.

Howl sat on the edge of the bed before his knees could give out on him, and she landed in his lap with a frothing swirl of petticoats, and he clung to her and only belatedly realized that he was speaking in a torrent of Welsh when she put a fingertip to his lips with an uncertain little smile.

"What are you talking about now?"

"You've married yourself an outright fool, cariad, but I love you beyond all reason, and you're being a little backwards. You don't need to ask what would make me happy; I'm a silly shallow vain coward and you make me far happier than I have any right to be, just as you are. And all else I could possibly want is my section of the bathroom cabinet left in peace, because you really don't want to know what an accident with lavender hair dye does to my complexion; it's terrible. Horrifying. Anyway. I'm the one who needs the answer to that question. What am I supposed to do? What do you want me to pretend I know how to be next? Because I've gone and promised you a happily ever after and I've no idea how to go about getting one for you and I'm terrified I'm going to disappoint you horribly--"

Sophie put her fingers to his lips again, her brow creased with bewilderment. "You're the one who has it backwards," she said. "I'm your wife. It's my duty to please you, not the other way around."

"Who on earth told you _that?_" Howl demanded, incredulous.

She flinched a little from the pitch of his voice, and said, "I wouldn't mind at all if you wanted to of course, but you don't have to feel obliged, Mrs. Fairfax told me it's never a good idea to make your husband feel obliged to make you happy so..."

"Mrs. Fairfax is an antiquated old biddy if she told you that," Howl said, still astounded.

"But everyone knows that," Sophie said stubbornly, her eyes lowered. "Until you get to be an old lady and don't have to worry about being respectable anymore, a woman's task in life is to find a man to marry and to make him happy and give him children..." Her voice quivered a little. "And... and it's my duty to... please you in... other ways, except I don't know what it involves really, just that if I don't please you then you'll go find another woman who can, because that's what men do, particularly if they're good-looking, and I really wouldn't like that-- I mean-- I want to be the one whom you smile at, I want to be the one you want to love, and so if you'd please just tell me what to do already..."

Not for the first time, he cursed Ingary and its backwardness, and its traditions that had convinced a shining, brave, fierce soul like Sophie that she was worth nothing more than becoming a meek and faded spinster making hats for other women who could be successful and happy because they weren't born eldest of three in a poor family or some such nonsense. --And when the be-all and end-all of 'successful' for a young woman was defined as landing a suitable man and dedicating your life to mindlessly slaving for him, Howl suddenly wasn't so surprised that she'd clung so fiercely to the freedom given by the 'curse' of her age.

"Then I want you to be an old lady!" he said, vexed. "I want you to be the bright and ferocious and opinionated Sophie I fell in love with. And respectable can go hang itself. I've done perfectly well without being respectable a single day of my life, and I have no intention of starting now! And I certainly don't want you to feel obliged either! Of all the ridiculous notions-- I didn't marry a 'proper' Ingary girl; I married you, you silly goose, with all your tempers and all your cleaning and that wild magic absolutely pouring out of you when you don't choke yourself off with ought-tos and should-haves and propriety and such--"

And then, listening to himself, he realized that Calcifer had been right all along, and that he really had been a fool this evening, trying to drink himself silly because he couldn't think of a way to abruptly remake himself into what he ought to have been. He was still a cad, a coward, and as unreliable as a mayfly, and it was the unmitigated truth that she deserved better -- and yet Sophie, gallant fool that she was, had gone and married _him,_ despite his cowardice and his vanity and the dreadful mess he made of the bathroom sink and all of it.

Clinging to her tightly, his face half buried in the blossoms in her hair, he said, "We're both fools, aren't we."

"What?" she managed, understandably confused by the leap in conversation.

"Don't change a thing," he said. "I wouldn't know what to do with you if you didn't terrorize the spiders and scold me when I'm being incorrigible and bully Calcifer into doing the cooking whether he likes it or not. Don't worry about being a respectable housewife. Just be Sophie. Promise me that, cariad."

"I... um... oh." Sophie looked up at him with that terrifyingly fragile, trusting joy shining in her eyes again, and she stroked her fingers through his hair, and said, "I promise. Your turn, now: promise me you're never going to try to turn respectable on me, because then I would have to wonder who'd taken you away and left a doppleganger in your place, and I wouldn't know what to do if you weren't being so mischievous I have to grumble at you several times a day!"

"Oh, I can certainly promise not to be respectable," Howl said, rueful. "You're certain this isn't some sort of trick question, though? It almost sounds too easy."

"The truth is I like you better mischievous," Sophie said. "But I certainly am _not_ about to admit that to anybody else! So this will be our secret, all right? Promise me you'll always be my whimsical, magical, frivolous rascal, because I need help learning how to be carefree. And I'll be your opinionated, outspoken, and spider-terrorozingly organized -- what am I? A witch in training, I suppose... in any case, you need the help with organization just like I need the help with frivolity, really."

"That," Howl said, rueful, "is heaven's own truth, cariad. You have a deal."

"Good," she said briskly. "Now will you please tell me what I'm to do here tonight? Because Mrs. Fairfax makes it sound like a terrible painful traumatic ordeal to be endured through obligation, and I suddenly find myself a bit less willing to take her advice at face value. And I would imagine that someone with your reputation must have acquired quite a bit more experience than I have, since I have no experience to speak of, and I haven't even read any particularly educational books on the topic; so any advice you might have on the topic of intimate marital relations would be much appreciated."

The wizard Pendragon was far too dashing to gawk, but Howl Jenkins found himself standing there with his jaw hanging open at her distinctively Sophie-brand combination of ruthless efficiency and startling innocence.

"Er," he managed, quite intelligently given the circumstances.

"Well?" she asked, head held high despite the suspicious blush in her cheeks.

"I love you," Howl said fervently, which had very little to do with the topic at hand but was resoundingly true nevertheless. He scrambled for something more apropos to say, and finally managed, "I think perhaps rather than listening to Mrs. Fairfax, we should listen to each other instead, and, er, make it up as we go along?"

Sophie considered for a moment, then nodded and slipped her dress to the floor. "Well, come here then," she said, her chin still just a little too high to be comfortable for her.

But that put her at precisely the right angle to be kissed soundly; and Howl Jenkins never was one to let fortuitous circumstances slip by unexploited.


	2. 34: Ever After, and Then Some

**Title: **Ever After, and Then Some (pt 1)  
**Author**: himitsu  
**Fandom**: Howl's Moving Castle  
**Challenge #34** - Breathe and bath me, just be and save me  
**Length:** 7502 (19 pages-ish)  
**Disclaimer:** Still not mine... continuity a freeform blend of post-book and post-movie... see also notes on the first chapter!  
**Rating:** PG-13

* * *

His wing was trembling with the strain, even as he tried so hard to pretend that nothing at all was wrong; Sophie fixed him with her best ninety-year-old-and-cranky glare, because some of the skills acquired with her artificial age hadn't worn away completely, and she said, "Stop that." 

"Stop what?"

"If you strain your wing muscles that badly, how are we to get home when the rain lets up?"

"Who, me? I'm fine--"

"Not only are you the worst liar I've ever met, you're shaking all over." She reached up and tugged at a double handful of black feathers; his wing crumpled over her more abruptly than she'd expected, and she sighed a bit, and settled herself more comfortably against the glossy black warmth of his side, covered more closely by his wing when it wasn't strained into an arch to make it an overlarge umbrella for her. "There. Much better."

He shifted again, trying to flex his wing to shelter both her head and the tips of her toes; Sophie elbowed him rather sharply. "I said stop that."

"But your feet will get wet."

"That's what shoes are for," Sophie said, half laughing and half frustrated. "I'm not as fragile as Calcifer. Not even now. Rest your wings. ...I like it better when I'm all wrapped up in your feathers anyway," she added, a bit more shyly. "It feels like the warmest hug ever..."

"You should have mentioned that sooner," Howl replied, and fluffed out his feathers like a broody mother hen, and furled the wing carefully about her, to keep her as dry as possible amid the torrential Welsh rain. He lifted a feather-fringed face toward the sky and said, "Such a cruel country. If you can see the top of Snowdon, it's going to rain; if you can't see the top of Snowdon, it _is_ raining. I shouldn't have brought you."

"I'm not made of spun sugar and I don't melt in the rain," Sophie replied tartly, snuggling into the warmth of his feathers despite the acerbic edge to her words. "It's a beautiful day anyway. There are a thousand different blues and lavenders and violets in the clouds... and you're so wonderfully warm..."

"And your feet will get wet," he replied, stubborn as ever. "If you catch a cold..."

Sophie reminded herself, not for the first time, that she'd known what she was in for. She'd already known that Howl was a melodramatic hypochondriac, a sulky brat, and a dreadful malingerer all rolled into one; the only surprise was that he was an equal-opportunity hypochondriac and malingerer, far more concerned with the slightest of her sneezes than she'd ever been.

"If I catch a cold," Sophie said, "then I'll have the chance to run you and Michael ragged fetching me juice and chicken soup and slippers and reading material. Turnabout is fair play, after all. I'm almost looking forward to it!"

"Sophie!" he protested, half laughing and half scandalized. "You have to be more careful with yourself!"

"Has the bird-shape given you bird-brains too?" she retorted, with a suspicious twitch at the corner of her lips. "You treat me as though I'm an egg about to break."

"But... cariad, you are."

"No, love," she replied, smiling. "An egg about to hatch, if anything. And it's not like I can drop the egg and break it if I sneeze. Relax, you silly goose."

When his bird-shape sighed, his feathers tickled her, and she laughed despite herself, settling in to enjoy the rest of the rainfall.

* * *

By the time it had stopped raining, it was nearly sunset; Howl spent the entire interval fussing at her with every wingbeat of the trip back to the door in Trehaven. 

"...And when you catch a cold and sneeze too hard and slip on the stairs and fall down and hit your head and bleed all over the floor and it soaks into the wood and you slip on that and..." His voice spiralled higher and more hysterical on each round of worrying.

Sometimes, Sophie wished that someone attending their wedding had had the foresight to include a muzzle and a leash, or at least a muzzle. From her current vantage point of a swing-seat carefully held in his claws, there was no way she was close enough to his head to be able to shut him up. So instead, she pulled out a gift from her nephew Neil, a small white box that was enchanted to contain dozens of different musicians at once. Some of them were only considered musicians by virtue of making sounds, Sophie thought, but others were rather nice, and Neil had even taught her how to explain to the box which musicians she wished to summon at any given moment.

Sophie attached the little white vines to her ears and called up a gentleman named Rachmaninoff, who said nothing at all about colds and sneezing and blood on the stairs.

* * *

Sophie's hem was a bit damp when they finally arrived at the Trehaven door, and Howl set her down and all but chased her inside; he flopped in after her, trailing dripping wings behind him, and in the much smaller enclosed space indoors, he reeked of wet bird. Sophie decided it was kinder not to complain, since he'd gotten himself so drenched worrying over her. 

On the other hand, Calcifer complained loudly. Of course.

Howl shook himself all over, drenching half the room and scaring Calcifer halfway up the chimney, before he leaned against the table and reabsorbed the feathers into a body that stretched and shifted into a human shape once again.

With a sigh, Sophie glared down at her now quite thoroughly dripping dress, and said, "_Who_ was it worried about my catching a cold, again?"

Howl flinched guiltily from the combination of her glare and Calcifer's, and took a double-handful of her hem to try to wring it out. "I'll just--"

The log pile was close enough for Calcifer to reach, and so it was close enough for Sophie to reach too; she clocked her incorrigible skirt-chaser of a husband over the head with a stout branch, because he'd just bared her ankles to the entire _room_, regardless of the fact that the only other inhabitant in the room was a fire demon who would presumably be less than interested in a the scandalousness of a human lady's ankles. It was the principle of the thing.

_"Not in public!"_ she said fiercely, settling her skirts again and turning toward the stairs, her back ramrod-stiff.

Laughing and wincing at once, one elegant hand rubbing the bump on the top of his head, Howl said, "How on _earth_ is this _public,_ cariad?"

"Calcifer is here!" she said, blushing, and feeling rather silly as she tried to make her way up the stairs without baring more than the tips of her toes as an example for him.

"And if Calcifer weren't here? Because I'm sure he wouldn't mind a vacation..."

"Then there would be your spiders, of course!"

Howl spent so long clutching at the railing and laughing himself light-headed that she managed to make it halfway up the stairs unmolested. Then, of course, he simply leapt over the railing and swept her off her feet with a flourish of indignant petticoats; and he carried her upstairs despite her thumping vigorously on his shoulders and demanding to be set down that instant.

* * *

Practicality was hardly the first word one thought of in reference to the wizard Howl, but had learned a sort of very peculiar variation of practicality from his wife. It had evolved from watching her give practical reasons to do things, and took an inevitable twist somewhere inside his convoluted and slithery mind. His conclusion seemed to be that practical excuses were somehow logically connected to practical jokes, and that practical excuses made the best excuses of all when he wanted to get away with something utterly outrageous. 

At the moment, he wanted to get away with having both of them in the bath at once, despite Sophie's near scalding embarrassment and the fact that he'd thrown enough scents and powders into the bath that she set off in a sneezing fit despite herself.

"There, you see? I told you you'd catch a cold! We have to get you warm as soon as possible!"

"I'm sneezing on the bath kerfriffles, not a cold, you-- you--"

"You're the self-conscious one, you know. I'd be just as happy without all the bubbles and 'kerfriffles,' as you so charmingly put it, because without them we could see to admire each other properly; but since you turn such startling shades of scarlet whenever I make suggestions along that line--"

"Yes, I appreciate that you permit that _fraction_ of a semblance of modesty, but--"

"Then if you're not objecting to the bubbles, what now? We're both soaked, and we should both warm up."

"Yes, but--"

"You know how Calcifer will complain if he has to fill the bath twice."

"Yes, I know, but--"

"And there are no spiders at _all_ to watch us; you've chased the poor things out of here long since."

"Of course I did, but--!"

"Besides. It's more efficient this way. People's arms just aren't designed to wash their own backs."

"Yes, but-- but--"

"You're _far_ too fond of that word, you know," he mused, fingertip to chin. "It seems I shall have to exert some effort to expand your vocabulary."

And then a twitch of his fingers had the laces of her dress dancing themselves out of her bodice, and the fabric slid loose most alarmingly; Sophie yelped and clung to it.

His palm was too deliciously warm against her newly-bared skin, and the protests she'd been trying to make were cut short when he brushed her hair aside from her throat and placed a kiss against the crook between her throat and shoulder. Sophie tried, she really did, because this wasn't seemly in the _slightest_, but all she could manage were a few embarrassed little squeaks.

The even more lethal variation of his well-polished excuse-making routine involved alternating stiff doses of vastly unfair charm and wistful-eyed sentimentality. He slipped her dress from her shoulders, and turned a devastating smile on her, and bent close enough to kiss her throat again, murmuring into the soft ticklish skin just beneath her ear, "I'm still a new father-to-be. And it's unfair of you to keep all the joys of your motherhood hidden away where I can't see or touch. Please, cariad? Let me hold both of you at once?"

Sophie felt as though her face was burning nearly as bright as Calcifer's. "You -- you -- incorrigible, manipulative -- you're not even supposed to _notice!_ Let alone go around -- _staring_, and _touching_, and-- and-- it's just not _decent_!"

"Decent? _Decent!_ Cariad, when has anyone ever accused _me_ of being _decent_? I must have a word or three with the movers of the rumor mill, really! _'Decent.'_ Hmph. Of all the indignities! My laboriously-maintained reputation as a ruthless and incorrigible scoundrel will suffer horribly if _that_ little falsehood ever gets round the neighborhood..."

And somewhere amid that cheerful little diatribe, somehow, when she wasn't looking, he'd gotten them both undressed and into a bath so full of bubbles Sophie was buried up to the chin. But in some ways that was even worse, because the warm bath was so soothing, and his hands had much freer rein when she was seated in his lap and she couldn't see where he was going with them to try to smack them when he grew too unconscionably bold.

"By the way -- why on earth am I not supposed to notice?" he murmured into her hair, cradling her beneath the water in a warm and entirely-too-tempting embrace. "I would have to be blind _not_ to notice."

Sophie ducked her head as much as she could manage without drowning herself in bubbles, and stammered, "Because it's unkind to comment when a woman is losing her figure! And I can't help it, I'm in the family way, of course I'm losing my figure, and I'm going to be quite misshapen soon, and that _doesn't_ mean you have to tease me about it like everything else-- it's an inevitable effect, there's nothing I could do. And my condition is all _your_ fault to begin with, you cad, so the _least_ you can do is to be considerate and look the other way when I've grown awkward and -- and not up to your standards of beauty and perfection--"

"Wait, wait, _wait,_" Howl said, struggling not to laugh at her; she could feel the tremble of it where her shoulders rested against his chest. "You aren't losing your figure in the slightest! To the contrary, you're distinctly _gaining_ a figure--"

Humiliated, Sophie tried to elbow him somewhere in the vicinity of the ribcage and wriggle free, but he clung quite insistently.

"I mean it, cariad," he murmured, with a smile so rich in his voice that it was nearly as tangible as the warmth of the bath. "It is certainly not a loss of any kind. We're gaining a family. How on earth could that be a loss? And how could you lose anything in the process? To my eyes, you've barely begun your gaining, and as usual I'm quite an impatient scoundrel."

"Don't even try to tell me that you haven't noticed that I've let my dresses out! You notice _everything_ about clothes -- particularly when it comes to how to get them off a person--"

"Oh, I've certainly noticed," he admitted gaily. "And I've appreciated the view! Sophie, you have nothing at all to be ashamed of. Nothing to be ashamed of, and everything to rejoice in. --If in Ingary a father is not supposed to notice when his child is growing, then I call that cruel and unjust rather than 'proper'. If the mother is free to notice, and free to love the child from the very first, why is the father not allowed to share her delight and anticipation?"

Eyes shut tightly, nose almost tickled by the bubbles, Sophie said, "_How_ do you twist words around like that, so that the most improper thoughts sound nearly _respectable?_"

"Is that how it is in Ingary?" Howl countered, resting his chin against her shoulder. "A mother is to hide herself in shame of her child, and a father is to ignore her pregnancy completely? How is that not cruel to all three?"

"It's... just... it's a woman's condition, it's not something for men to concern themselves with. And it's so... so flagrant," Sophie murmured. "It makes known to the world what should be kept private between two people, it shows at a glance that... that we've..."

"We _are_ safely and properly wed, you know," Howl said, affecting a great overabundance of innocence, complete with bright wide who-me eyes and all. (How on earth he pulled off radiant innocence while they were both birth-naked and entwined in each other shoulder-deep in a far too extravagant bath really needed to be chalked up as one of the great mysteries of the world, in Sophie's admittedly biased opinion.)

"Yes, but..."

He set a fingertip to her lips lightly. "There's that word again." With a contemplative glance down at the toes he poked out of the bubbles to determine whether in fact they were still there, he added reflectively, "I should think that after this many centuries of people marrying and children coming after, that Ingary's society ought not be so startled by the thought. It occurs often enough to have become less shocking an event, wouldn't you say?"

"What about Megan?" Sophie challenged, clinging to the one thing she understood of his world: that his sister Megan was far more respectable than Howl himself was. "Surely she wasn't shameless and public while -- while in a delicate way, was she?"

"The word 'pregnancy' really isn't profane, my love. Rather the opposite, in fact."

Beneath the cloud of bubbles, his fingertips were wandering about her recently- enlarging middle, as though to draw further attention to the point of the discussion. Sophie hid her face in both dripping hands, and managed to scold through a half-strangled voice, "Stop avoiding the question!"

"As a matter of fact, Megan was quite 'public'," he told her, wry, as he rested his cheek against the bath-damp crown of her head. "She worked as a receptionist at the local hotel when she and Gareth were first married, and everyone who passed through the hotel for several months could see quite clearly for themselves that Neil was coming. And neither she nor anyone else thought it a particular scandal."

Sophie opened and closed her mouth several times.

"Well?" he asked, mirthful. "If the ever-so-respectable Megan Parry considers it unremarkable to be seen in such a state, does that ease your embarrassment any?"

"Your country really _is_ that much different, then?" Sophie asked, faintly. "I mean -- it's not _just_ that you're trying to get away with making everything you possibly can into a walking scandal and trying to drag me into your scheming without even telling me because you know I'd never go along with such a thing -- if I asked Megan, would she tell me the same tale?"

"I'm hurt!" Howl declaimed, the dramatic effect of the wrist to his forehead somewhat impaired by the bubble-dripping. "Wounded to the quick--"

"You're also a shining paragon of dishonesty," Sophie retorted, on surer grounds now that she had felt out a moral high ground to stand upon.

"But I would never lie to you about something so important to your happiness," he replied, very softly.

And no matter how badly she wanted to convince herself that he was simply applying his charm again, Sophie couldn't find it in her heart to believe that he was toying with her this time.

But she also couldn't find it in her heart to become as openly wanton as her husband seemed to wish, not without a little more reassurance that perhaps by some other rules of civilization it might perhaps not be as wanton as she thought after all.

In a very small and sheepish voice, she asked, "If we were in Wales, then, it wouldn't be scandalous for me to go into town even when I've... when my condition is... more noticeable...?"

"Not unless you were planning to paint yourself pink and orange and spotted green in the process, and in that case I would call it appallingly bad fashion sense rather than a scandal." After a moment, he added thoughtfully, "Though perhaps the scandal would be how I had permitted a garment of that level of tackiness to be located anywhere within ten miles of either of us; _that_ bit of speculation might cause a fair commotion about Porthaven..."

With a sigh, Sophie took the reins of the conversation away from his inevitable rambling analysis of couture, and dragged him back to the topic which concerned her. "What I'm asking is... is... that your country really _is_ very different, isn't it? You were raised differently, and so that explains why you think so many odd things are perfectly normal?"

"Again I find I am disconcertingly close to honest when it comes to you, love," Howl replied with a rueful grin, "because even I can't let that stand completely uncorrected. In Wales as much as anywhere else, I am considered a shameful cad, a coward, and a shiftless good-for-nothing, as I'm sure my own family will inform you. At some length, and upon as many occasions as they can manage to catch your ear."

"I expected as much," Sophie said, trying to be as much on her dignity as she could manage while blushing and nose-deep in bubbles.

"But upon the topic of the delight of your pregnancy," he added, "and the way that even strangers will take joy in its evidence -- there I dare say I am not so immodest and out of step in my thinking. And if you wish to hear it from Megan herself, if you feel that her assurance on the matter would be more reliable than my own, I'm sure I can arrange a visit..."

"Could you?" Sophie asked, without thinking.

She felt his flinch against her back, and realized how seriously he'd taken it a moment too late. "No, no, no -- it's not that I don't trust you -- er -- not that I don't trust you about this -- not this particular time anyway -- that is to say -- oh _bother_--"

"Your faith in me is magnificently underwhelming," Howl said drily, keeping his voice light and his chin propped on the top of her head, so that she couldn't read the hurt in his face; but that little flinch had given away more than he would have wished, and it tugged at her heart more than any number of buckets of slime and histrionic wails could have.

"Howell Jenkins, that's _not_ what I meant at _all_," Sophie said, distressed. "I believe you, I really do. I believe you when you say the customs are different in your country -- I believe you truly do feel it should be a joy rather than an embarrassment -- I just -- I'd like to talk to Megan as... someone who's been through this before, someone whom I can ask about... things to expect. I mean, I practically raised my little sisters, so I know about children, but... but I didn't give birth to them as well! And since I doubt you've made a habit of bearing children no matter how exotic the shapes you take might be... I just... wanted to talk to her, since she would know..."

Somehow, something in her stammering incoherence must have been close to the right thing to say; he'd relaxed a little, and his breathing had steadied, and when she twisted around to try to look at him, his smile was gentle enough to be real, even if it held a breath more mischief than was likely to be comfortable.

"So, we should go and visit Megan, so that you can ask her to verify the extent of my lack of morals under the cover of learning about prenatal care? How very devious of you, my dear; I think my bad influence may be rubbing off after all!"

...And he sounded positively _proud_ of that last pronouncement.

"That's not it at all! That's not-- you _know_ that's not -- now you're just being wilful, you--"

"What are you complaining about, cariad? We both agree I'm a rogue and a scoundrel who ought not be left loose in civilized company. It's only--" and here he gave an overdramatic little sniffle-- "only a _little_ heartbreaking that I've married a woman of sufficient wit that she won't accept a _single_ word I say without signed and sealed documentation from three independent sources to verify it..."

The lugubrious tone, combined with a startling mimicry of a woeful basset-hound's gloom and an enormous sigh, drove Sophie right past the edge of her self-control. She scooped up a double-handful of water and bubble-froth and dumped the lot over his head.

He shoved the now-thoroughly-drenched and bubble-glittering black mop back from his face, laughing at her with those vivid eyes shining, awash with all the blues and grays of twilight, like sunlight breaking through stormclouds; and she forgot how to breathe momentarily, caught fast in his charm even when he wasn't consciously trying to wield it upon her.

Something in her face must have spoken of her state of stunned-witless-rabbit-twitching-ness, because he tipped his head a bit to one side, and his smile deepened in a certain way that was only ever meant for her; and he leaned closer and kissed the tip of her nose, stroking her hair back from her face with damp fingertips.

"Rwy'n dy garu di, fy nghariad firain, fy anwylyd, fy nhrysor gwyn..." The melodic lilt of his native accent was thicker in his voice in his own language, and when he spoke words of magic, and when he spoke words of love; blushing, Sophie wondered which was the case this time.

"Somehow," she said, breathless, "you always make everything sound like an enchantment. What is that?"

"An enchantment, of course," he replied. "Let me translate." His arms tightened about her a bit, and he drew her close enough to kiss again, brushing his lips against her cheek and her brow and her throat by turns. She was about to ask him to translate properly, with actual words, but by that point he seemed more intent upon the kissing.

She really ought to have complained, of course. But his enchantment was quite effective, particularly the translation, and it kept her from protesting whether she liked it or not. Or at least that was what she told herself, so that she had an excuse for enjoying it.

Somehow, it made it more difficult to blame him completely for the two hours they spent in the bath; it seemed Howl's ways really were rubbing off on her. Sophie had never thought of a bathtub as somewhere that any reasonable person could possibly spend more than half an hour; but then Howl had never been a reasonable person, and his methods of persuasion were _quite_ persuasive indeed.

Even enchanted bathwater went cold eventually, though, and the bubbles died away to the point where Sophie was squirming with embarrassment. Of course, she knew she had a body to be kept under her clothes, but that didn't mean she had to _like_ the fact, since the existence of her body mostly seemed to serve as an enticement for her already-incorrigible husband to look at her and think of even more creatively scandalous ways to make her blush.

When it was time to get out of the bath, Howl decided the next blush-provoking tactic required soft fluffy towels and a great deal of rumpling that made her hair stand out in all directions, like a silvery-frosted hedgehog. She tried to button her nightgown, swat at him, and calm her hedgehog-hair at the same time; but there really weren't enough hands to go around, so she was a bit stymied.

His barely-muffled snickers turned the tide in favor of the swatting, and the towel extended her reach quite nicely; he yelped like a startled puppy when she stung his ribs with a towel-snap, and jumped into the windowledge for refuge... and then he looked at her head again and went back to snickering.

"Brat," she said, wrapping the towel around her head to try to hide the disaster area he'd made of her hair. "One can only hope the baby's temperament will come from my side of the family."

"Now that's a _terrifying_ thought," Howl replied, brimming with glee. "Two sisters who decide to trade lives under their teachers' noses, and a third who runs off with the most notorious evil wizard in all the lands? Heaven forfend! At least from my side there's a half a chance of ending up with a Megan. I'm sure she was much easier on our parents."

"I'm sure she was," Sophie replied, finishing the last few buttons and brushing off the skirt of her nightgown reflexively. After a moment, honesty forced her to add, "I'm sure she was also dreadfully dull."

"She was," Howl agreed, and swept Sophie off her feet again before she could put a hand on the door. "Not in the least dashing or romantic or cavalier... so naturally I'm honor-bound to compensate the universe for that imbalance in the world's aesthetics; she is my sister after all, it's a family obligation--"

"--No you don't," Sophie interrupted firmly.

Howl blinked at her through a rumple of raven-dark hair that had gotten tousled into his face. "I don't?"

"Not the karmic balance of melodrama, just the bedroom," she said. "We're both as close to squeaky clean as people who aren't dishes can get. --And no, I don't want to know about people who _are_ dishes. What I want is for you _not_ to take us into that room where there's an inch of dust on all the knickknacks because you haven't let me clean for a month. My hair is already gray enough; it doesn't need to have a layer of dust on top of it for finishing touches."

"Your hair is silver," Howl said.

"And you're still not taking me in there damp and ready to pick up dust from everything."

"Picky, picky..." He shivered a little, his back arching, and Sophie realized he was transforming beneath her, still holding her in his arms; for a moment he balanced her in the crook of one wing-soft, claw-handed limb, and ran the other hand through his hair, and came away with a glossy black feather; and then he collapsed into himself again, and winked a purely human eye at her before he bent towards the door.

"Copynnod bach, hidia befo! Y dewines glanweithdra sy'n dwad!"

"What are you on about now?"

"Just warning the poor little spiders that the Witch of Cleanliness is coming," Howl replied; then he brushed the feather back and forth lightly under the doorknob.

The keyhole twitched.

Howl tickled the doorknob again.

The keyhole made horrible wriggling faces and then gawped wide and gasped, and the entire room bulged and convulsed and sneezed a huge cloud of dust out the window.

Sophie blinked in astonishment as Howl patted the doorknob lightly and murmured, "Sorry, old friend." He opened the door to a sparkling-clean room where the various pinwheels and dangles were still spinning madly, and a crop of utterly terrorized little spiders clung for their lives to the inside of a bobbing and dangling watering-can.

"If you could do that all this time," Sophie demanded, "if you could clean this place that easily, why on earth _don't_ you?"

"How do _you_ like being tickled until you have to cough up a lung?" Howl asked mock-indignantly, carrying her over to the bed; a twitch of two fingertips had the bedcovers unfolding themselves primly, and he settled her in with a care at odds with the amused exasperation in his voice. "I should imagine it's no more pleasant for the room, to say nothing of the trauma to the spiders. And if I tried it with the whole castle? I'm sure it would feel like a vastly unpleasant case of purgative influenza -- not to mention the chances that it could blow Calcifer out completely! I may be wicked, but I'm not cruel!"

"Well, if you cleaned more often, maybe you wouldn't have to put the place through convulsions in the process--"

"I'll think about it."

"Of course you will," Sophie said with a sigh. "Mostly to think of a way to get out of it."

"You know me far too well, cariad."

He summoned up a ridiculous pile of floral-embroidered pillows from somewhere in the variegated baroque mess of the room, and settled Sophie into the bed with vast gentle care, settling the fleur-de-lis comforter over her lap, calming the wild bristly silver-hedgehog of her hair with a few careful strokes from graceful fingers, and smoothing her nightgown over the still-slight curve of her middle.

With the little bulge curving the front of the white nightgown, her midsection looked like nothing so much a baker's loaf of bread rising softly beneath a tea-towel, patiently waiting to grow round and full enough to earn its turn in the oven. Howl stretched out beside her and bent his dark head close, nestling his cheek against her fullest place, for all the world like a child listening at a door that held mysteries on its far side.

Sophie looked down at him, and couldn't find the words to protest the impropriety of it; so instead she let herself stroke his hair smooth, working out the bath-tangles with her fingers, and smiling to herself when he wriggled like a playful kitten and arched his head toward her palm.

"Mmmm..." He was half a breath away from purring at her, even.

"I find it astonishing that you could ever transform yourself into a dog," Sophie said, "considering how completely and totally feline you are. Mercurial, indolent, and far too aware of your own beauty and charm -- definitely a cat type..."

"How fortunate for me, then, that you seem to be a bit of a cat fancier," he replied lightly, still cradling the curve of her middle with warm and gentle hands. "Can you be still for a moment? Hold your breath a little?"

Rather puzzled, she took a deep breath and held it, stilling the hand that had been stroking his hair. He was raptly focused on her middle, both hands cupped to the soft rounding, his body bowed like an arch as he rested an ear ever so lightly against her; then he shifted a bit, and then froze motionless.

Sophie couldn't help gasping for breath after a long minute, and glowered at him. "Excuse me, I'm rather fond of breathing--"

"I can hear his heartbeat," Howl whispered, looking up at her with shining eyes, and this time it wasn't just his smile that caught her breath away.

"...what?"

"Two heartbeats," he said, with sheer joy shining out of him nearly bright enough to burn. "Yours and his -- his is lighter, quicker-- ah, love, don't ever say to me that you should be ashamed!"

"I want to hear it too," Sophie said, in a small voice, because she wasn't supposed to admit such a thing to herself, let alone to her husband.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Howl cared as much for "supposed to" as he cared for "polite," "cleaning," and other similarly mundane words, which was to say he cared not in the slightest. There were times when Sophie felt rather guilty about the way that she could count on that fact, but over time she was learning to ignore the guilt; really, he was rubbing off much too thoroughly.

Howl hopped off the bed and began poking through the wilds of his collection, tossing aside a handful of bright scarves, a smattering of jewelry, a kaleidoscope, what appeared to be the mangled innards of a clock, three peacock feathers, a child's model plane, a jar full of several different colors of sand, a piece of driftwood, and two turtle shells before he came up with a picnic basket and a purposeful glint in the eye. The picnic basket was the next to be disassembled at random; over his shoulder went a hand trowel, several packets of seeds, a pinwheel, a handful of bus tokens, a delicate golden cameo-necklace, some kind of child's toy on a string, and a piece of sun-crazed, sand-etched float-glass before Howl made a sound of delight and came out with a perfect oyster shell.

He was already fiddling with it by the time he shuffled his way through the pile on the floor to return to her side; Sophie couldn't help staring, because the patterns his fingertips traced left a glowing trail behind upon the surface of the shell for a moment before fading away. He carefully separated the two halves of the shell, and placed one piece to her ear and the other to her middle.

"I'm not completely sure if this will work," Howl admitted, boyishly rueful. "It seemed a good theory, though -- two halves of the same shell, accustomed to cradling the same pearl of treasure with each other, and the symbolic affinity between shells, the ocean, time, tides, sound, and whatnot--"

"I hear the ocean," Sophie said, surprised. "I thought that was only from the bigger shells?"

"You're hearing a different ocean than you think," Howl said, and brought the listening-shell to his own ear for a moment, seeking an echo from the other shell as he moved it slowly over the curve of her stomach. "You're hearing the ocean within yourself -- the child floats within your womb, rocked to sleep in the lingering embrace of the eldest sea; what you hear is the sea within you. When the child moves, it can be tricky to find a place to hear the heartbeat again... not to mention the technical and aural difficulties with an utterly improvisational mage-wrought shell-stethoscope; just a moment..."

Somehow, even when Sophie was fully dressed and covered with a sheet and watching her mad genius of a husband guide an ensorcelled seashell over her rounding middle, it felt even more intimate than when they'd shared a bath without a stitch of clothing between them. Perhaps it was something to do with the shell-magic -- it almost seemed as though his fingertips left a trailing shadow of warmth behind, where the shell touched her; or perhaps it was simply his own magic, because she'd always been hypersensitive to his hands, and his voice, and the warmth of his breath upon her shoulder whenever he bent to murmur something particularly mischievous into her ear. In any case, the bath's bubbles had let her console herself that at least the impropriety wasn't visible; but the little clan of spiders was still blinking out at them from the questionable shelter of the watering can, and Sophie wanted to shout at them to mind their manners and look somewhere else.

Then, of course, she realized the foolishness of shouting at spiders about their manners, because if spiders had any manners they wouldn't take up residence in a married couple's room anyway.

"There," Howl said, and offered her the listening-shell again.

Or, of course, the foolishness of shouting at spiders about their manners might have something to do with the fact that they were only spiders, but the fact that Howl had conversations with them made her tend to discount the only-spiders theory a bit more than she should have for the sake of general sanity and--

oh...

"Oh," Sophie said, and tried to calm her suddenly madly beating heart, because it came close to overpowering the sound of the small, quick, delicate counterpoint that was her child's heartbeat. His child, their child -- suddenly it was real to her, real as a person, not just as an embarrassing medical condition to be concealed, or an awkwardness of figure requiring too-snug skirts to be loosened -- because medical difficulties or overindulgences certainly didn't come with a separate heartbeat of their own.

For the first time, she wondered what it would be like to hold their child in her arms, and see her own baby look up at her. She wondered if it would have Howl's beautiful stormy-twilight eyes, or her sister Lettie's candlefire-bright hair. She wondered what its name would be, and then realized that they would need to decide that, since the baby wasn't likely to wake up one day and tell her, even if it was an entirely different person growing inside her middle, which was an unsettling enough thought by itself.

She meant to ask, really, but her lungs were caught somewhere around her throat and her eyes were prickling with tears for no rational reason whatsoever, but the emotional reasons were close to rolling her over and washing her up to dry, and all she could manage was, "Oh..."

Howl stared at her in rapidly growing dismay, and waved both hands madly. "No no no no _no_, don't _cry_, I didn't mean it to frighten you or -- or whatever this is -- I'm sorry, I shouldn't have -- I'll never do it again -- I'm so sorry, cariad, _please_ don't cry--!"

She shook her head a little, and scrubbed the heel of her hand across her eyes, because the tears were escaping despite her best efforts, and she couldn't stop gasping around the ache in her chest long enough to explain.

The top half of Howl vanished over the side of the bed abruptly, his feet sticking up at odd angles as he dug around beneath the bed for a moment; but unlike the seashell, this treasure-unearthing took only a few seconds, and then he turned right-side up again, peering cautiously over the edge of the bed to see whether she was still on the verge of crying. His eyes were more cloudy-gray than twilight-blue now, storm-wracked and almost frightened, like a child; she wanted to apologize somehow, except that his distress upset her further, and she choked on a sob.

He set a fluffy, round-bellied teddy bear on the edge of the bed, and a little twitch of a fingertip had it putting its paws down and standing up and stumping across the comforter towards her; it put a soft little paw on her arm, bright button-eyes sparkling up at her, and Sophie scooped up the bear and cuddled it to her chest and burst into sobs.

Howl flinched smaller behind the bed, only his eyes and fingertips visible above the edge of it now, watching her cry, helpless and miserable. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I promised you a happily-ever-after -- what did I do wrong...?"

"Nothing!" she managed to choke, clinging to the bear's soft plush warmth and sniveling quite embarrassingly. "I'm happy, I'm terrified, I don't know what I am-- I'm sorry I'm crying--"

"...You're not angry?"

"Of course I'm not angry--" She hiccuped on tears, and scrubbed the back of her hand across her face, and her voice squeaked and caught short as she said, "Why on earth would I be angry? I'm delighted and scared witless all at once-- there's another entire person inside me, someone I don't even know, it's astonishing, I have no idea what to do, but why would I be angry?"

"...Because I promised you a happily-ever-after, and yet you're crying," he whispered.

"Oh-- oh, silly, _no_, that's not it at all--" She set the teddy bear aside and reached over to catch his hands, and tugged until he'd hesitantly crept close enough for her to cuddle him instead of the toy. "You silly darling," she murmured, nestling her head against his shoulder and closing her aching eyes. "Happily ever after doesn't mean you never get upset."

"It doesn't?" he asked, warily. "Isn't that the contract? Happiness, and forever--"

"The world does come in shades, you know," she said, with a small giggle. "Sweetling, my sweet silly love, I adore you to bits and pieces, but you're so terribly overdramatic -- everything is black and white with you, the heights of joy or the slimy depths of despair, nothing in between! But for most of us, there really are different shades of happiness, and some of them are a little bit terrifying. That's all. I'm so happy at the thought that I'm having your baby, I almost fear my heart might burst; it's so much too full right now that it aches..."

"Oh," he said, tentative, and dared to touch her cheek to brush away the lingering tear-streaks. "Does that happen? I mean -- I am not precisely reaccustomed yet to having a heart; it's been a long time..."

"Trust me," she said, and snuggled closer to him. "Sometimes you can be so happy you're scared you'll explode. And the scare is just as real as the happiness. But to the best of my knowledge, no one's ever died of a heart bursting from happiness yet!"

"How very strange," he murmured, and rested his head lightly against the still-damp silver-rumple of her hair. "But as long as you're happy, then I'm satisfied." Then he opened one bright blue-gray eye and asked, just to make certain, "You're _sure_ you're happy?"

"Positive," Sophie assured him, listening to the slow strong beat of his heart beneath her cheek. "And I'm just as positive I'm terrified. But I'll think of something to do. One of us has to be the practical one around here, really."

After a moment, Howl murmured sleepily into her hair, "If you're tired out with the practicality, I could try to be practical for a while."

Sophie laughed; she couldn't help herself. "Would you even know where to start?"

He thought about it for longer than should have been necessary, before coming up with a somewhat sheepish-voiced and tentative offer. "I could make sure the castle sneezes itself clean at least once a season? And... well... brown is a terribly practical color; I could..." He shuddered a little in reflexive distaste, but gamely made the offer anyway. "I could dye all my suits brown. And paint. I can paint things. Brown and gray. Dingy drab colors are quite dreadfully practical, aren't they?"

When she trusted herself not to burst into shaking hysterics and mortally offend him in the process, Sophie managed with an almost steady voice, "Love, just let me be the practical one. It's less traumatic for both of us that way."


	3. 17: Friends, Romans, Countrymen

**Title:** Friends, Romans, Countrymen  
**Author:** Hi-mi-tsu  
**Fandom:** Howl's Moving Castle  
**Challenge # 17**- I think I used to belong here  
**Length:** 5767 words  
**Rating:** PG or PG-13 (never quite sure where the boundary is there)  
**Disclaimer:** Still not mine. See the blurb on the first piece. (I'm kind of proud of the line the title came from. You'll know it when you see it... )

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Somehow, Sophie's former customers and neighbors must have thought that she'd gone deaf when she'd married the most infamous wizard in the lands. There was no other way to explain why they thought she didn't hear them whispering. 

_"I hear he's collecting a harem, and now that the poor Hatter girl's gone and gotten herself in the family way, it's just a matter of time until he casts her aside like all the others he's tired of..."_

_"That would be just like him! Heartless wretch, utterly irresponsible, so horrendously vain-- I'm sure he'll cast her aside when she gets big..." _

But rather than sympathetic or concerned, the voice of Letitia Horner, whom Sophie had previously counted as a friend, sounded positively _delighted._ Gloating, even.

_"But isn't it shameful how big she's gotten already? And just brazenly walking around in public like that -- they suit each other, really they do! I'm not sure which of them is the more scandalous. The marvel is that he hasn't cast her off already--"_

Sophie stormed her way home, rather literally; Calcifer ducked into the grate to avoid the lash of torrential rain that followed her in the door.

"_Someone's_ in a mood!" the fire demon called to his wizardly master. "Watch your step, Jenkins; I don't take kindly to being drowned for someone else's offenses!"

From the second story, a black-winged Howl peered cautiously through the stair-railings, fluttering near the top of them in case he needed to duck for cover, and he asked, "What have I done this time?"

Sophie opened her mouth to lay a pox on Letitia Horner and all her cadre of gossips, and a good bout of itching on Howl for assuming that she would punish him whether or not he'd been at fault, or else for assuming that her moods were so capricious that he had no way of knowing whether or not he'd offended and so the only solution was to assume he had, or for getting her into a condition that was evident enough to be gossiped about, or just in general -- except that she found that she'd burst into tears instead.

There was a very unmelodic squawk from her bird-shaped husband, and then much thumping and banging as he half-flew-half-tumbled down the stairs. Howl hobbled over to her and wrapped her warmly in his wings, and then he began stroking her hair as though she were a chick in need of preening, murmuring to her in that lilting liquid nonsense of his native tongue. Sophie buried her face in the thick soft feathers and sobbed herself exhausted; when she was wearily sniffling at the end of it and leaning more on his support than on her own, he coaxed her over to the edge of the hearth and settled them down and kept preening her hair, his glass-gray eyes bright and anxious.

"Beth sy'n bod? What's gone wrong, cariad?"

"Nothing," she said, blowing her nose into her kerchief. "Everything. Letitia Horner-- and Elisabeth Bradford and-- and-- all of them--! They say you're going to jilt me now, because I'm -- I'm -- becoming misshapen, and--"

"They're a flock of shallow purblind idiots, you know," Howl said, quite conversationally, as though he were offering to pass the tea. "Surely you don't think I _would_, do you?"

"No, of course not -- though it's true you're overfond of beautiful things -- and I'm not precisely graceful now -- but it's not that I believe them, not really; it's... it's... I thought they were my friends, I thought we spoke to each other civilly at least, but all of a sudden it's like I'm not even real to them anymore, like I'm just a part of your legend, just someone to be gossiped over, someone to make a cautionary tale of -- like I'm just a story now -- or... I don't know..." She blew her nose again, and blinked up at him blearily, and asked in a small voice, "You wouldn't, would you?"

"Good heavens, no!" Howl said, indignant enough that his feathers were ruffling themselves at her.

"And you're not being shiningly dishonest at me?"

"...This is the disadvantage of a carefully blackened reputation, isn't it," he said, with a little quirk of pain at the corners of his eyes. "I swear to you on my life, cariad, and that is a very serious thing indeed for someone as self-centered as I am. I swear I will never abandon you. You would have to get a pry bar, several court orders, and likely two or three binding curses if you want to be rid of me; and even then I'm sure my inestimable talents in the slithering field would put up a challenge. So you're rather stuck with me, I fear. I take vows quite seriously, which may explain why I've gone to such lengths to avoid giving one to the King. Understand?"

Sophie nodded against his chest, trying to smooth his feathers settled again, because he was still all rumpled and fluffy, like an indignant half-fledged chick, and it was far too adorable for her state of vexation to tolerate. "Then they really are fools," she said.

"Malicious fools at that, and envious."

Sophie scrubbed at her cheeks, and tried to summon the focus to glower at him despite how warm and soft and comfortingly fluffy he was being. "Because of course anyone would envy me capturing the most notorious skirt-chasing coward in all the lands, since he's so very beautiful and far too aware of it?"

"Of course," he said lightly. "And of course anyone would envy you the happiness they see in you. I often find myself baffled as to why life with a notorious skirt-chasing coward seems to suit you so well, but whenever I see you smile, it assures me that you _are_ happy. Your joy is bright enough to light half the town, cariad. And any small-minded gossiping geese who would like to pick away at that as though they could steal it for their own by ruining it for you... they need to be plucked and trussed for a holiday roast, that's all there is to it. --I do know a thing or two about small-minded gossips, you see, having made quite a study of using their natural tendencies for my own purposes. We simply need to turn this on their heads."

"But you can get use from having your name dragged through the mud," Sophie murmured, glaring at her handkerchief. "You want to drive off the little petty nuisances who want a hex for this and a charm for that; if it takes courage to go knock on the door of the dreadful wizard Pendragon, then the day to day pettiness sorts itself somewhere else. There's nothing I can gain from having my name dragged through the mud, other than being a shame to my family..."

"There's always something to gain," Howl said. "How do you think I got my start in studied name-blackening? My family was more than ashamed enough of me as it was; I decided I may as well take advantage where I could."

"But you can't go back now," Sophie said, startled. "I mean -- you can, but you won't... you won't belong. It will never be home again. You can't fit all the power and all the whimsy and all the magic in you into their little mundane lives -- you've stretched your wings beyond their world, and Megan won't forgive you choosing that wild freedom over her horrendous respectability--"

"I know that, love," Howl murmured, wrapping her more securely in his wing. "I made my choice long ago. I should have realized how my choice would affect you, though, and for that I am truly sorry. --There's a reason my door opens into four places at once, you see. Because I can touch any of them, but I don't belong to any of them anymore; I only belong on the edge of their lives, never actually predictably there, never really a part of their worlds. And now I've gone and dragged you with me into a life where people up and make legends of a person, willy-nilly."

"I seem to recall I had quite a bit to do with the dragging," she replied. "Don't you take all the credit there."

"Or all the blame?" he asked lightly. "I'm not certain that you'll ever be at home in Market Chipping again, for much the same reason -- Lettie has the makings of a good solid housewitch, someone who keeps the hens laying and the cream from curdling, but she's too practical to imagine anything greater. You're both practical and wildly creative, and the combination is, frankly, terrifying when I consider it too deeply. A woman who can fight off a thousand-year-old fire demon with nothing but her walking-stick, who can hold Calcifer in her hands without so much as burning her palms, who broke a contract that should have killed me and forced my heart back into my body and kept it beating in her hands by sheer determination -- the power in you is far too vast and wild for a simple hatmaker in a dusty little village, cariad; and the silly geese recognize that, even if they don't know what name to put to it."

"...So I don't have a home either, now?" she asked, hating how her voice wavered at the thought.

"You most certainly do," Calcifer grumbled. "Where do you think you're sitting, girl?"

"_Oh_," Sophie said, and reached over to rumple Calcifer's bright flames a little; he arched his head into her hand almost like a sulky ginger-kitten, pleased by the affection but still a little cranky. "Of course this is home," she said, "of course I love you both-- it's just... I'm... I'm accustomed to having a home that comes with, er, neighbors. Someone I can ask for a cup of flour if I've run out..."

"You're one of the most powerful magic-users I've ever seen, and on pure instinct at that," Calcifer replied, still grouchy. "Get your lazy husband to train you properly, and make your own cup of flour."

"Thank you, Calcifer, but it's... that's not what I mean. It's... different."

"Calcifer doesn't understand neighbors, really," Howl said, a bit rueful, smiling at them both. "Where he's from, neighborhoods are measured in billions of miles. But those of us who were born human are a little more attached to the thought of having others of our kind around us."

"You're not human anymore, either of you," Calcifer said. "'Human' is overrated anyway, if those petty little gossips are any example of what 'human' is supposed to mean."

"But we both remember what it was to be human, not so very long ago." Howl stretched and shifted beneath her, and the feathers melted back into his body, leaving her sitting in the lap of a now-perfectly-human-seeming young man wearing a black jacket with "Welsh Rugby" emblazoned across it. Then he ran his hands down her body, quite insinuatingly, and her dress shifted and snugged and rearranged itself until she was wearing something more like a much-abbreviated nightgown than a proper dress.

Staring down at herself in astonishment -- there were more than a few curves more visible than was really proper, particularly right at the moment -- Sophie plucked up the mental coordination to act as though she'd somehow been not the least discomfited, because Howl derived far too much entertainment from making her squeak in surprise, and normally the best thing to do was to plow right on through with her head held high and hope she didn't trip over something too embarrassing in the process.

"So, since we've decided I don't belong here anymore, we're going to shock all my former neighbors into heart failure by having me walk around dressed like some disgracefully-bulging harem girl?"

"_Disgraceful?_ I'll have you know that's my child you're insulting, Mrs. Fussbudget! Of all the nerve!"

Sophie laughed, because she couldn't help herself, and said, "Some more-than-amply bulging harem girl, then?"

"Well, you would be quite charming with bells on, and you are quite nicely provisioned for a belly dance-- _ouch_. Careful, love; you've been sharpening those elbows again, haven't you? Rather fond of my ribs, really..."

"Hmph." Keeping her chin up by sheer willpower, Sophie was glad that she didn't have to meet anyone's eyes, even Calcifer's, as she said, "Then I suppose the last time I ever walk down that street may as well be memorable."

"Last? Who said anything about last?"

"I couldn't hold my head up in public if I walked out into Market Chipping wearing something like this in front of all the world," she said.

"Then we'll just have to walk out into someplace a little more welcoming than Market Chipping. I have just the door in mind, actually."

The sight of an enormous crow in a black leather jacket flying through Trehaven's night sky must have been unsettling, Sophie thought, if anyone had bothered to look up at them; but there were no particular outcries or flung stones, and Howl backwinged his way to a perch atop a faded brick building with a folding metal bridge attached to its side, and shrugged his way back into his human self again.

"I hope you don't mind the fire-escape entrance," he said ruefully, offering her his arm to hold. The one advantage Sophie was willing to grant her ridiculously undercut garment was that with so little fabric in the skirt, she didn't need a spare hand to hold the hem out of her way, and so she could steady herself quite confidently between Howl's arm and the metal bannister.

The front door of the building was painted in a script Sophie had never seen before; she'd thought his own language was written in the same characters as her own, since she could read some of his books, and she tugged at his sleeve a little. "What on earth does that say?"

"Taj Mahal Curry and Chips," Howl said, rubbing his palms together in anticipation. "Just the thing before a match starts and the local gets itself inundated."

"The local what?"

"One at a time, cariad. First we've got to introduce you to tikka masala!"

As it happened, "tikka masala" was not the woman standing behind the counter in clothing far more reminiscent of a harem-girl than Sophie's own. It was also not the man standing over several fragrantly steaming pots and vats of variously-colored oozes and slimes. Sophie was about to crossly demand why Howl had spoken of introducing her to someone who was clearly not present, when the smiling woman handed him a tray with an assortment of oozes, some golden-fried potato wedges, and some flat crispy-soft bread; and he whisked both Sophie and tray over to a table with surprising alacrity.

According to Howl's running commentary, "tikka masala" translated to "chicken of the gods", "tandoori" translated to "grilled with red dye on," "biryani" translated to "contains fruitcake-innards only without the cake bit," "paneer" translated to "squeaks in your teeth," "chutney" translated to "pickles of everything that pickles oughtn't naturally be made of," and "vindaloo" translated to "kills small animals and uncautious linesmen."

Sophie suspected that his translations were somewhat lacking in integrity, but the ooze named tikka masala was certainly quite tasty despite that, and so was the mango chutney. There were tastes and fragrances coming out of the various little bowls of ooze that she'd never encountered before, and she wondered whether of any of the castle doors might be persuaded to open into a market where she could buy some of their spices. Of course, it would help to know what she was looking for, and she stewed over what to do about that for a while, because the language that the man and the woman were speaking to each other bore no resemblance to anything she knew.

Finally, much to Howl's snickering amusement, Sophie gathered up her nerve and what there was of her skirt, and marched over to try to speak hand-gestures-and-facial-expressions to the woman behind the counter.

The woman's name was Anathalakshmi, which Sophie contracted to Ana, and her cook's name was Raghuvinderjit, which Sophie contracted to a pointed finger and "him". Sophie's name came out more as "Sofi", and her husband's as "Haulu", which she felt uninclined to protest given what she was doing with their names. Beyond that, Ana's vocabulary seemed to consist mostly of the words for the various types of ooze, numbers, "please," "thank you," "yours," "mine," "yes," and "no." On the other hand, that was more than Sophie could reply with in Ana's language.

Ana showed her several containers of spices, and let her smell them, and pointed at each vat of fragrant ooze and then several spice containers in succession, all the while chattering away in melodic and completely foreign sounds. Then she started trying to explain something that didn't appear to involve cooking; she poured some tiny green seeds into Sophie's palm and mimed eating them, and ate one herself, and so Sophie took a nibble. The flavor was startling, bright and sweet-sharply licorice.

Ana giggled at the expression on Sophie's face, and poured her palmful of seeds into a little paper packet, and tucked it into Sophie's hands with another pouring-out of musical sounds. Ana made a gesture like rocking something in her arms; then, at Sophie's evident confusion, she patted the curve of Sophie's middle, and then made the rocking gesture again, and pointed at her teeth.

"...Oh! You mean they're for the baby? Teething? Oh goodness. I mean, er, thank you. That's very kind..." After a moment, she couldn't help herself: "Am I really _that_ big already? Howl, you slithering reprobate, you told me people wouldn't _mind_ here!"

"She certainly doesn't mind," Howl said, leaning on the counter watching them with one of his more indulgent smiles. "Lakshmi's got three of her own; she's sharing experience, that's all."

He made a beckoning gesture to Ana, and said "Your three," gesturing to her children's approximate height the last time he'd seen them. She shook her head with a laugh, and corrected their heights considerably upwards, and even her taciturn cook chuckled at Howl's wildly overexaggerated heart-clutching shock.

Ana produced a small but astonishingly well-done portrait from her handbag, and gave them the children's names; Howl came closer to being able to pronounce them than Sophie did, but Ana was clearly trying not to laugh at them both. Then Ana patted Sophie's middle again, and cupped a hand to her ear.

"Names?" Sophie guessed. "I'm not sure really... we've got some ideas, but..."

"Venkatesh," Ana said firmly, pointing to her cook and Howl. "Or Gurdayal." Then she pointed at herself and Sophie and said, "Madhushri. Or Rajani. Yes?"

"We'll, ah, certainly think about it," Sophie said brightly, hoping she didn't look as glazed and twitching as she felt. So with her little packet of seeds in hand, she tried to drag Howl out of the curry shop before he could promise Ana either an unpronounceable name or their firstborn's hand in marriage to one of her three.

"Just so you know -- nothing strange," she said firmly. "We're not naming this poor child anything with more syllables than I have fingers. Understand?"

"Llefelys, then?" he replied, with far too innocent eyes. "Or Myfanwy. Only three or four syllables there--"

Sophie chased him halfway through Trehaven, swinging her handbag more like an iron mace than like a fashion accessory.

By the time she'd worn herself out of breath and he was laughing too hard to run further, the sun had thoroughly set for the evening and the great enchanted fireflies attached to posts along the road were beginning to light themselves for the night; Howl slung a black-jacketed arm about her shoulders and rumpled her hair, and said, "Perfect timing. The game should be on in ten minutes or so; shall we?"

"Shall we what?" she asked warily.

"Right, then," he said, as if that had been in any way interpretable as a 'yes,' and he tucked her arm through his. He led her through a narrow little side alley and up a much smaller road to the door of a place that proclaimed itself "Y Gath Ddu," which sounded like the symptoms of a messy and unpleasant respiratory disorder to Sophie, but which made Howl beam with anticipation.

"You might want to be prepared to duck," he said gaily, "the boys have a tendency to greet folk with tankards chucked at one's head, you see--"

And on the heels of this less than reassuring pronouncement, Howl flung the door open and took up one of his most dramatic poses in the doorframe, leaning on one hand, hair tossed back, palm to heart as he declaimed to the room at large.

"Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your beers!"

And as he ducked out of the trajectory of a ceramic ashtray that was promptly lobbed at his head, Sophie tugged at his elbow. "I don't think that's quite how the quote went somehow--"

"It is tonight," he replied, laughing, as he dodged another piece of furniture and dove headlong into the lager-scented chaos.

They clearly knew him here, because he was greeted with a torrent of Welsh -- "Hywel! Hywyn bach! Sut hwyl? -- uffern na, mae Siencyn y lloerig yn dod eto! -- beth yna? Doethur Siencyn y lloerig sy'n dod, Sioni -- Eirfon, un peint arall--" and also with a torrent of projectiles, ranging from beer mats to peanuts to more solid objects that kept him nimbly dodging while he slapped people's shoulders and scruffled their hair and helped himself to a swig from other people's beverages at random.

Someone noticed the door was still open, and called a fluid interrogative that seemed to involve a few extra throat-clearings and a cat-hairball or two; Howl put down someone else's glass and waded his way back through the fracas toward Sophie, still laughing. He put an arm about her waist and said something to the room at large that involved her name, and then within ten seconds the entire room was silent.

"Howl?" she asked, a bit nervously. "Howl, what did you just say?"

"Saesnes?" someone said into the silence, clearly incredulous. "'Dy saesnes ddim siarad? Siencyn bach, beth sy'n bod arnoch chi?"

"Well, _this_ is going just swimmingly," Howl said, and reached blind for someone's glass and drained it before he tried again.

His voice sounded like she hadn't heard it since the Witch of the Waste, strained and desperate beneath a too-thick layer of frivolity, even when she couldn't understand a word he was saying; even without knowing the words she could hear the tension of his worlds pulling themselves apart again, the tension of coming to a place he'd thought of as refuge, a place he'd thought would always welcome him as one of their own, and finding himself a cast-off once again.

Sophie decided it was time to take matters into her own hands. "Do these people speak English?" she demanded.

"Not by choice," Howl replied softly. "Can you give me a moment, love? I'm trying--"

"I know what you're trying," she said, and picked her way carefully through the mess of shells and beer mats on the floor to where the bartender was. "Excuse me, sir. Um. Un peint os welk in da. Is that right?"

The bartender was twitching a little. "Os gwelwch yn dda, saesnes fach," he corrected.

"Right, then," she said, and took some Welsh coins from her purse, and offered them to him.

The bartender looked at Howl over her head, and said something incomprehensible; Sophie rapped the edge of a coin on the bar, and said, "_Excuse_ me. Os gwelwch yn dda."

Howl looked a little wild around the eyes, the whites visible all round, like a startled deer, and he said very carefully, "Cariad, it's not that he won't serve you, just that you oughtn't drink in your condition."

"All right, then," Sophie said, chin up and refusing to blush by sheer force of determination. "How do you say hot tea with milk?"

"This is, er, a rugby pub," Howl said. "We're not quite that civilized in here. Um." He cast a rather desperate, pleading look at the bartender, and rattled something off, and the bartender grunted and fetched a couple of pint-glasses down from the rack, and slowly the conversation began to restart itself with fits and twitches.

The bartender put two glasses in front of her, both of them filled with an amber liquid that bubbled; it looked something like what the rest of the inhabitants were drinking, but when Sophie took a sip, it tasted of apple juice and a child's ginger-beer, not of alcohol. But it was a beverage, so she pushed her coins toward him and said carefully, "Iawn yn fawr."

"Not quite," Howl murmured into her ear. "Diolch. Diolch yn fawr."

"Diolch yn fawr, then," she said, and the bartender nodded at her gruffly, turning back to pulling pints for his other customers.

There seemed to be a three-foot sphere of denial surrounding the two of them; even in a crowded room, nobody approached them, and nobody spoke to Howl, though there were plenty of disbelieving looks. Sophie used both hands to keep her pint-glass steady, because her hands were shaking with frustration.

"You don't have to sit with me," she said. "You don't have to drink what I drink. They're your friends. Go have fun. It's all right; I'll be all right; go make up with them!"

"If we're not both welcome, cariad, then neither of us are welcome. If you'd like, we can go--"

"No."

"Cariad, really, we can just--"

"You always do think running away is the best answer, Howl Jenkins. Now, I admit you know them better than I, so you may well be right. But even if you're right, _I'm_ too bloody-minded stubborn to let go of this so easily! Now hush and drink your juice!"

She put her glass down carefully, and tried to think through the throbbing headache. It was terribly gallant of him, of course, but also terribly frustrating, because she knew that he'd brought her here precisely because he'd expected that they'd both be welcomed, and it had to be a bitter disappointment to be so bluntly proven wrong. And after a life with Megan, he was terribly sensitive to being pushed away. Surely some of these people had to know him well enough to know that.

Most of the men were huddling around the two enchanted boxes at the end of the room. Like Howl's window, they showed a view of something that couldn't possibly be on the other side; it was a bright green field with stripes and several red-shirted and blue-shirted men on opposing teams, wrestling in the mud over a small oval ball. From the way they reacted when one of the red-shirted men put the ball across a certain line, Sophie presumed that the red-shirted team was Welsh somehow.

So she picked up her glass and elbowed her way through the crowd to find a seat closer to one of the boxes. Her new neighbors cast her some startled looks, and scooted over on the bench to leave her room; and then something of interest happened in the box. Sophie crossed her ankles and sipped at her juice as the men around her erupted in cheers and catcalls.

A few moments later they remembered her again, and hastily clamped down on what must have been some fairly colorful language not fit for mixed company, but Sophie could give them a perfectly untroubled smile because she hadn't understood a word of it.

Someone had accosted Howl at the bar, and they were having a heated conversation complete with much throwing-of-hands-in-the-air; Sophie wasn't quite sure if she should be concerned or not, because that seemed to be the way a lot of conversations with Howl went sooner or later. And so she kept nursing along her apple juice and trying not to spill when people jumped off the bench howling imprecations at the box.

One of the younger ones, one who barely looked old enough to be in an establishment of the alcoholic sort, came back from the bar with a double-armful of pints, and his comrades expressed their vocal and somewhat tipsy appreciation at great volume. Sophie flinched in absolute astonishment when he held out the last one to her. It wasn't quite like the others -- the bubbles were larger, and there wasn't a froth on the top, just like her juice and ginger-beer; she cast a questioning look across the room at the bartender, who made a shooing gesture at her, and so she took the pint-glass from the far-too-young-faced boy and said carefully, "Diolch yn fawr."

He beamed as though he'd just taught a dog to speak, and nudged a benchmate and commented, and then he shoved someone else out of the way to sit down beside her as though she were a new and fascinating type of pet.

"Don't mind the lads, ma'am," the boy said, leaning on the table quite a lot, and Sophie wondered how much he'd had to drink already. "It's just -- Dr. Jenkins, you know? _That_ Dr. Jenkins, _our_ Dr. Jenkins, going and getting himself _married_ of all things, and to _saesnes_ at that--! Never ever thought we'd see the day--"

"What does that word mean?"

"Saesnes? English. Englishwoman." His mouth twisted like he'd bit into a lemon.

"But I'm not English," she said.

"Really?" He seemed compelled to translate this to the room: "Oi! 'Dy hi ddim saesnes--" Then he blinked, and shoved his hair back from his eyes, and asked, "Then what on earth are you? You're too -- too -- not-obnoxious-like to be American or Aussie -- Canadian maybe?"

"I'm Howl's wife," Sophie said, since it seemed safer than guessing at a nationality she'd never heard of before.

The boy let out a bark of laughter, and clapped her on the shoulder. "Wel, gwraig doethur Siencyn, rhaid i chi fynd i dysgu cymraeg!" He lined up the empty glasses on the table -- there were quite a few of them -- and started counting them for her: "Un peint. Dau beint, tri pheint, pedwar peint... reit, come on, then, not-saesnes; un, dau, tri..."

By the time she'd finished that second glass, she could count to ten (most of the time, unless the words decided to mutate in more than one direction on her), declare that several of her neighbors were drunk (much to their amusement), thank Aidan her young tipsy instructor and Eirfon the bartender for her juice-and-ginger-beer, and give a toast declaring that the beer was lovely and the fire hot.

At some point in the process, Howl had slithered his way over to her and insinuated himself between her and the bench, so that she was sitting in his lap before she even noticed; it had probably happened around the time that Aidan had discovered that her midsection was inhabited with something that kicked, and the boy had gone about excitedly declaring to the room at large that clearly the baby was intended for future greatness in rugby, with both hands cupped to her bulge as though she were a particularly docile specimen at a petting-farm.

At first she was too astounded to slap him, and then Howl was there and inconveniently had her hands caught in his, and then more of "the boys" wanted to greet the future rugby star, regardless of the possibility that it might be a girl -- "girls can play rugby just fine," Aidan assured her, and Sophie didn't have the heart to inform him that that wasn't nearly as reassuring as he expected it to be. Because between her temper and Howl's passion for rugby, Sophie was quite certain their daughter might well be more of an unholy terror on a rugby field than their son.

By the end of the game, Howl was having an emphatic rollicking debate with two or three of them at once, and Aidan had convinced his brother Aled to help train the language-impaired not-saesnes their Dr. Jenkins had married, and their friend Ieuan was laughing at the lot of them. And then someone started singing the saucepan song.

"Wait, I _know_ this one!" Sophie said in delight, and picked up her empty apple-juice pint to wave in tempo with the rest of them.

Astoundingly, even a pack of drunk-out-of-their-minds Welshmen could produce breathtaking four-part harmony, with Aled and Ieuan and Sophie singing the melody line thanks to the boys' astonishing falsetto range. Howl's voice was better than he claimed it was, probably assisted by the fact that he wasn't drunk this time round; but Ieuan was far and away the best singer of the group, and he blushed ferociously when Sophie told him so.

In a way, Sophie was sorry to say farewell for the evening, because even if it wasn't her home or her culture, she'd felt the beginnings of what might be a family's type of welcome there when she tried to meet the rugby boys halfway. But then again, she was quite, quite glad to see the castle door once more, because she was six months heavy with child and had just drunk two full glasses of juice, and so the w. c. was the very first order of business.

Second was producing the souvenir she'd brought for Calcifer, of course. Eirfon had given her a pocketful of coal as a parting-gift; though clearly puzzled about what the not-saesnes lady might want with it, he also just as clearly knew not to bother questioning any oddities that drifted about Howl Jenkins, because it would have been even odder if there weren't any oddities. Calcifer jumped straight out of the grate into her hands, crackling away in delight; laughing, Sophie tucked the coal into the hearth safely, and patted him good night.

"Why didn't you tell me neighbors come up with coal for you?" Calcifer called after them as the two made their way up the stairs for the night. "Flour, who cares; but if I'd known neighbors had _coal... --Oi! _Jenkins! Jenkins, this castle needs more neighbors, you hear me?"

"You know, cariad, we're _never_ going to hear the end of this one," Howl said with a martyr's sigh.


	4. 24a: Friends, Romans, Countrymen 2a

**Title:** Friends, Romans, Countrymen part 2a  
**Author:** Hi-mi-tsu  
**Fandom:** Howl's Moving Castle  
**Pairing:** Howl and Sophie  
**Challenge # 24** - I wanna die, I wanna live you  
**Length:** Not sure yet - not going to have time to finish part 2b tonight, so who knows how long it'll turn out...  
**Disclaimer:** Still not mine. This is going to lead into another appearance by the rugby boys, but I didn't have time to finish that much tonight! Still putting book and movie continuities in the blender together to see what comes out. See the first part for the title to make sense. Chronological index of how they all fit together is linked from my profile.  
**Rating:** PG-13ish

* * *

Between the drizzle outside and the grumpiness within, it was shaping up to be a very cranky day all round. Wizards' handwriting, Sophie had decided, left a _great_ deal to be desired. In all areas. The lack of clarity, the slapdash scribbles all over the margins, the assorted rings left behind by cups and beakers of heavens only knew what -- she was beginning to suspect that the greatest hurdle to overcome in being a wizard's apprentice was the hurdle of learning to read any of one's textbooks. She wondered if they did it intentionally. She had little doubt her husband was intentional in his hasty and near-illegible scrawls in margins, because anyone of Howl's level of power needed to make sure that dangerous information didn't fall into the wrong hands -- and also because he was just that careless about everything that had anything to do with the tidiness of anything other than his wardrobe.

But even if her husband was a lost cause from the outset, the original spellbook-writers themselves, Sophie thought, should have given a little more care to actually transmitting the information to eyes other than their own. That was, after all, the purpose of going to the trouble of writing in a _book_, as opposed to leaving hastily thought-up chalk-scrawls on the table where they were sure to be erased with the next scrubbing.

At least, Sophie had always _assumed_ general legibility was the purpose of writing a book, particularly one this heavy; but the more she squinted at this one, the more she doubted herself.

Sophie's middle was being more distracting than usual, as well. Clearly the general mood was contagious, because there was a great deal of kicking and thumping going on inside, vigorously protesting the book's weight against a stomach that had lately grown round enough to make heavy books in laps awkward. Finally Sophie heaved the book over onto the table in order to rub her misbehaving bulge, hoping to settle her guestroom-boarder into at least a bit of peace and quiet.

"Honestly, you in there," she muttered under her breath, "how is anyone to get anything useful done whilst being kicked in the lungs? I'll have you know that's dreadfully uncomfortable!" She sighed, and stood and stretched, and began pacing about the room, because sometimes the rocking motion lulled the baby into drowsing; out of curiosity, she wandered over to the worktable where Howl was tinkering with some metal bits and some springs and wires and scowling more fiercely than the clouds outside in Market Chipping.

She peered over his shoulder, one hand propped in the hollow of her back for support, and asked, "What are you doing?"

"None of your business, Mrs. Nose," Howl replied crossly, and swept his arm across the table so that the metal pieces scattered to the floor like glittering bits of a broken puzzle. "One of us tainted by this is more than enough."

"Tainted by what?"

"...Tell me, do you have some particular hearing problem that seems to think the phrase 'you shouldn't need to know' only applies to other people?"

"You're in just as foul a mood as the little punter, aren't you," Sophie said, with a glare. "You're training me, so I'm your apprentice, remember? Asking questions is what apprentices _do_. And if some people would bother writing _legibly_ then maybe I wouldn't have to ask so many questions--"

Howl slouched forward over the table, face buried in his hands. "Then maybe you shouldn't be my apprentice at all."

Sophie stared at him, jaw hanging open, shocked beyond the capacity for speech for a moment.

It didn't last long, though.

"Howell Jenkins, of all the rude, inconsiderate, downright insulting -- what makes you think I have any less right to ask questions than Michael or any other apprentice? Just because you're in a terrible mood is _no_ reason to punish me by threatening my studies--!"

He dug both hands through his hair, with a vast shuddering sigh that somehow left him seeming smaller, huddled against a chill she couldn't see, his eyes far too old and aching for his face.

"I'm sorry," he said, and she was so startled by an apology before they'd even begun to fight properly that she couldn't even take advantage as she ought. "I'm sorry, love. It's not you I'm angry with."

"Then tell me what's wrong."

His shoulders stiffened again, and before he could start on another exasperated mini-tirade, she put her fingertips to his lips and said, "I'm not asking you to tell me how to do whatever it is that has you so upset. I just want to know _why_ you're upset."

He blinked, slowly, and then said, "It's my own fault."

"Oh, I'm sure of that," Sophie replied, with the hand that wasn't bracing her own back working at rubbing his tense shoulders. "Whenever you throw one of these tantrums, it usually is."

"Tantrums?"

"Tantrums," she repeated firmly. "It's clear enough to anyone that you were the youngest child; you throw tantrums with great abandon, and leave those of us who were elder children to pick up the mess."

"I am _not_ throwing a tantrum," he said, far more sulkily than his pride would have let him admit.

"...Of course you're not," Sophie said. And to make her point, she awkwardly knelt on the floor to begin picking up the glittering bits of metal from his dashed experiment. Her middle had grown round enough to make it awkward, but she didn't bother trying to mask the little pants of exertion when a clumsy stretch met with a kick from within, because that was simply helping her prove her side of the discussion.

"_Stop_ that," Howl said, and lifted her into his arms, settling both of them on the bench; then he gathered up the scattered bits with a flick of a fingertip, and they tumbled themselves into a glinting pile. "I said I'm sorry. The least you could do is pretend to be sympathetic, instead of accusing me of tantrums. --Honestly, woman, you've been married to me long enough by now to know that any _proper_ tantrum requires vats of green slime."

"I would have a better idea of how to be sympathetic," she said, "if you'd ever get around to telling me what's wrong."

He sighed again, and she could feel it in him, almost hollowing out his bones with the ache. Most of the time when he was being this overdramatic, there were already great looming shadows and lashes of thunder outside; it almost made her wonder if he was actually serious for once.

"Howl...?"

He buried his face in her hair, and his arms tightened just a bit about her waist, always so achingly careful of his strength when it came to their unborn child. He cupped both hands to her snug round curve, and murmured something gentle in his own language when the baby kicked at his palm; Sophie stilled his hands, and said, "Howl Jenkins, for _once_ will you stop slithering?"

"This is war, cariad," he murmured. "If I had my way, this would never have happened. Magic used for mass murder, the King asking me for tools that will kill, for weapons beyond what the Strangians have any hope of countering -- if I had any talent at slithering left, I'd be long since gone, but there's nowhere left for me to go, not now. Not since he's declared me his Royal Wizard, because now I'm a part of their damnable army, and if I try to leave they'll take it as defection to the other side no matter where I go. And while _I_ could run and hide and skulk in middens until this has all blown past -- I have too many hostages they could use, and they know it. That's the curse of your having found my heart, you see. It has this habit of getting caught in too many painful places. Love does this to people -- love, and fear... and the fact that they know they have me now. Because I fear losing you even more than I fear losing myself."

Her mouth was suddenly bone-dry, and Sophie swallowed hard, then whispered, "You mean it's my fault you're doing this?"

"No, love. Not just you. Not just Megan, even. Michael and your family and even that dratted turnip-headed prince, they've all turned themselves into people I can't abandon, and he knows that too damned well. And so here I sit crafting tools to tear other people's precious people from them, because I'm too frightened to risk my own..."

"That's love, not fear," Sophie said, softly. "If it were only fear, you'd have run already, and damn the consequenses."

"No, it's fear of everything," Howl corrected, gloomily. "I fear the thought of what could happen to you even more than I fear my own danger, and that is saying something. I am a horrible, cowardly, base, and conniving wretch. If I had any courage I would find a way to say no _and_ to save all of you. But the castle's doors have to open somewhere, and I can't take all of you to Wales, and Madame Suliman could follow me if I did -- he's made sure of that; he's quite ruthless behind that smile, really. I found Prince Justin for him, I've made him his seven-league boots and his divining spells, and now he wants enchanted crossbows that shoot a dozen bolts at once and aim themselves, because it would be more efficient than one at a time, and... I could lie to myself before, you see. Boots simply march. Divining spells -- just a glimpse of something. This is blood, cariad, blood and death on my own hands, blood spilled by the magic I had hoped only to wield for joy, and I can't lie and squirm and hide anymore. Not even from myself." He hid his face in her hair again, and murmured feelingly, "I _hate_ unpleasantness!"

If the rest of it hadn't been so serious, Sophie could have laughed at him; as it was, she turned in his arms a bit awkwardly, and reached up to touch his cheek, and said, "If you can't tell him no, let me tell him no for you. I do have some skill in being disagreeable at kings, you know."

He hugged her a bit tighter, shaking his head wordlessly. "Never mind. It's my stew, I'm not involving you--"

"I'm your wife _and_ your apprentice. I'm already involved."

"You're not going to the king now, and that's final."

"Because I've grown big with child? The fact that I oughtn't be gallivanting about in this state only lends emphasis to how strongly I feel the point must be made!"

"You have the same hearing problem with 'final' that you have with 'don't need to know,' Mrs. Nose--"

"When you make no sense, the best thing to do is to ignore you completely."

Howl made an exasperated sound. "You're not going to see the king now _because_ you're my wife, you're pregnant, and you're my apprentice! All three of those are hooks he can plant in you. He can control me by using you and the baby. He can control you by using me. What would you say when he makes all these terribly sympathetic and understanding sounds about how he appreciates that I'm a spineless coward and that he's placing enough pressure on me to break a person, and that you could spare me the unpleasantness of building crossbows if you use your witchery to charm him up ranks of mud-golems that can fight on their own? No blood in them to spill, no relying on your worthless husband, better all round? Except for the poor men of Strangia who can't begin to fight back against something that can't die..."

Sophie's brow was furrowed. In utter dismay, Howl said, "Don't tell me you're _thinking_ about it!"

"If we can't tell him no, then the best thing to do is to give him a yes that finishes the war as quickly as possible, isn't it?"

"_No,_" Howl breathed, and she could feel him shivering. "Dear God, no. As quickly as possible? I could finish the war this afternoon before tea. I could destroy their entire capitol. Or ours. It wouldn't really matter which. Because neither side would let me live after that."

"Howl--"

"They can't even be allowed to realize that that kind of power _exists_," he said fiercely. "Because then they'll realize that they don't control it, and they won't allow that to continue. They will have power or they will destroy it to prevent anyone else's having it. And so I run away. I run because there's nothing else to do; because if Calcifer and I ever really stopped and turned around to fight against humans, together, then I don't know what would be left afterwards. I truly don't. So there's nothing I can do but run... and now I've run into a corner."

"Oh..." Sophie hesitated, and then sighed, and put her arms about him gently. "I'm sorry."

"Whatever for? The war is hardly your fault. Not unless your talents in commotion-making have been working a _great_ deal of overtime while I wasn't watching."

"I'm sorry that you're trapped like this," she replied. No one would enjoy a position like that, and Howl responded even more badly than most people to being trapped; after having met Megan, she understood that he came by his slithering instincts naturally, after long practice in self-defense. And Megan was a ray of sparkling sunshine compared to finding himself caught up helping to fight a king's war, giving his wizardry to kill simple nonmagical soldiers who would never know what hit them, despite everything in him that cried out to help ordinary folk like those in Porthaven -- or Wales or Strangia or any of the lands-- survive around the burden of kings and their ambitions.

The baby kicked again, strongly enough to make her catch her breath in discomfort. Howl glanced down in surprise, and then cupped surprisingly warm hands against her ripening abdomen, rubbing a great soft heart-shape over her curve. Whatever little bit of wizardry-infused Welsh lullaby he murmured to the baby seemed to soothe her recently-kicked and aching lungs as well. Smiling, she put a light hand over his, to still his hands at a particularly nice place, while that little extra bit of magic-warmth still lingered.

"It's quite a waste to make you use your magic for unpleasantness," she said, a bit shyly, "when you're so talented at making pleasant things happen."

"Isn't it _such_ a cruel travesty?" he agreed, with an overdramatic attempt at a heart-rending wrist-to-forehead half-collapse back against the wall, which let her know that he was feeling a little better despite himself. He always adored any reminders of her small and grumpy boarding-guest, even when the scamp was making things uncomfortable for her personally.

"You don't say," Sophie replied, drily, because she just couldn't help herself; wry exasperation had become her knee-jerk reaction to excessive doses of melodrama, nearly an allergy by now, and constant exposure to Howl's histrionics had begun setting off her melodrama-allergies quite frequently.

"The world is too harsh and unrefined for one of my sensitivity to endure," he announced with a languishing sigh. "I suppose I shall have to go and faint elegantly at people, and see if the King feels any sort of remorse. --Though I expect he is just as hard-headed about fainting as you are about tantrums. Hmm." He sat up abruptly and rubbed his chin, lost in calculation that really did nothing for his attempts at limpid-flower-ness. "I know! You've got a perfectly good excuse to be fainting, and I'm sure you'd get a great deal more sympathy than I would, the people in Kingsbury are jaded that way--"

"I thought you said I wasn't to go see the King," Sophie protested. "Let alone faint in his lap!"

"Of course not! Not the King, he's got a heart of stone under that politely-smiling noblesse, aside from when it comes to his family. He's got to, to still have the throne under his rump when he sits down in a place like this, with Madame Suliman watching! No, no, just wander about the town looking fragile and delicate and wispy; and keep touching your middle, and look pained, and faint every so often when people are watching--"

Sophie snorted her opinion of that. "Fragile? Delicate? _Wispy?_ --_Me?_"

Howl tipped his head to one side and then the other, assessing the situation, like the birds he spent so much time among; and then finally he gave a vast sigh and admitted, "Not a chance, is there. It would be like putting a doily on a plowhorse."

"I could do without that particular comparison, but otherwise yes," Sophie said, half-lidded.

"I wonder what it says about the pair of us that I have far more talent in the delicate-and-wispy field than you do, even with the baby to give you advantages..."

"Why are you so surprised? You've always been good at having hysterics, haven't you?"

"_Ouch!_" Howl clapped a hand to his heart, chuckling. "Shot true enough, cariad, but oh, how it stings--"

"Hmph."

She'd been about to take the conversation further, only Calcifer called from the hearth, "Kingsbury door!" just as someone began rapping at it with something metallic, something other than knuckles, which said likely a cane's head or some official staff, which said likely a royal messenger. Sophie traded a silent look with Howl, and then she heaved a sigh and got herself up from his lap and headed grimly for the door.

"Tell them I fainted or something!" Howl whispered, and promptly flopped over to play dead. Except that he kept trying for a more graceful tumble of his hair with little furtive head-twitches, and kept shifting to get the most dramatic possible effect from the 'unconscious' loll of one pale long-fingered hand.

...Fat lot of help he was, really. It was a miracle he'd ever gotten anything done without her around.

The king's messenger blanched a little when Sophie opened the door, because over the months, most of them had gotten to know Sophie. They rarely got more than two sentences into their flowery intended-to-be-hour-long speeches before she cut them off at the knees, conversationally speaking, whilst tapping a walking-stick in her hands that let them know that she was more than willing to physically have a go at their knees if they didn't take the 'polite' conversational hint. But this one gathered up his nerve, and tried anyway.

He'd barely gotten through an abbreviated, relatively fast-forward attempt at Sophie's new title as the Royal Wizard's wife when Sophie's patience ran out. "Go away," she said.

The messenger blinked. "Madame-- begging your pardon most humbly, of course--"

"Time is valuable," she said. "Stop wasting both of ours and go away."

"But I haven't even told you what his most excellent and revered--"

"You have five seconds."

The messenger was brighter than some of his comrades. He didn't doubt that she meant it, and took a deep breath to chatter as quickly as he possibly could. "His-Royal-Majesty-has-sent-this-unworthy-servant-to-inquire-as-to-the-esteemed-Royal-Wizard's-progress-in-the-vital-matter-which-they-had-discussed--"

"Time's up," Sophie said. "The King's checking up on his newfangled crossbow things, is he?"

Helplessly, the messenger nodded.

"The King can go march his troops around for a while," Sophie replied. "They've survived without the things this long, they'll make do for a while longer, I expect. And they have all those boots Howl gave them, so they can do quite a lot of marching."

"Madame -- I must stress that this is a matter of critical importance to our nation's security and prosperity--"

Somehow, Sophie kept herself from snorting. "They all say that," she replied. "Come back later. Your Royal Wizard is currently resolving a crisis. He'll get back to the King when the crisis is over." She was rather proud of her attempt at diplomatic phrasing.

"Madame, what crisis could be of more importance than our nation's--"

_I'd say a crisis of conscience from a man thought not to _possess_ a conscience would be close enough. _"Are you telling me you want me to violate wartime security by passing information to someone whom the King clearly considers not authorized to know about it?"

From the hearth, Calcifer hastily muffled a cackle in a rustling of logs and a burst of sparks; Sophie wondered if Howl was twitching behind her, but she couldn't afford to look while she had the upper hand with one of these vexingly clingy and tenacious official creatures.

"That -- that wasn't what I meant, Madame--"

"Good, then. Go away."

"But--"

"Go away or the next wartime crisis you face is whether or not the 'heroically fallen in the line of duty' clause covers injuries received during a sound thumping from a vexed witch!"

"I'd go if I were you," Calcifer called helpfully. "Ladies in her condition -- quite temperamental--" And then he burst into crackling snickers again.

Pale as a sheet, the messenger bobbled an erratic little bow and stepped back just before Sophie slammed the door.

"Drat," she said. "I'd been aiming to bloody that overaristocratic nose of his, sticking it out like that into other people's business..."

By this point Howl was doubled up on the bench, shaking with barely-stifled hilarity.

"How... how on earth... _anyone_ ever called it a _delicate_ condition...! --clearly... never... never met you...!"

He gave up and dissolved into sheer mischievous glee, gasping with laughter and thumping one hand helplessly against the bench.

"Thanks _ever_ so much for the support," Sophie said, her face burning, and she turned toward the stairs to get away from both of her laughing idiots.

"Easy, there," Howl said, still laughing; he reached out to catch her about the waist as she brushed past, which Sophie thought was rather unsporting of him since it had lately become a sizable target to aim for. "I'm not mocking you, cariad; I'm marveling yet again at how much I adore you!"

She would have struggled, except that his hands had found that place in her back that ached, and he had snuggled his cheek against her heart and was looking up at her with unfairly wistful eyes, and he said, "Don't be angry? You are the most brilliant, remarkable, amazing woman I've ever met, and I'm still startled by my luck in convincing you that I was worth marrying. Particularly since you did know what you were getting yourself in for. --Still astounds me, that bit. If it would make you feel better, I'd be happy to remind you why you married me, if I'd ever understood it in the first place that is; but as it is I shall need a few hints..."

Her face was still burning, but for an entirely different reason this time; both hands to her cheeks, Sophie said, "I'll let you know as soon as I figure it out myself, you slithering charmer."

"Well, then, shall we start by testing whether you married me for the way I kiss you...?"

"That... that sounds as though it has potential, yes..."

Calcifer had a little too much relief-at-reprieve in his voice when he mentioned brightly, "Kingsbury door again!"

"...Oh, _bother!"_ Sophie stalked down the steps, swung the door open, and said to the very astonished messenger who hadn't even had time to knock, "_GO AWAY, WE'RE NOT IN!"_ before slamming the door in his face again and turning the knob to black-down for Wales.

A bit boggled, Howl said, "Sophie...?"

"Well, come on, then," she said, chin high. "Change clothes and whatnot. It's bad form to lie to the King's messengers, you know, so we'd better not be in by the time he summons up the gumption to try knocking again!"

Laughing, Howl stood and stretched and shifted his black and scarlet suit into the rugby jacket. Sophie's high-waisted, spring-green empire gown was something they'd settled upon as convenient for both worlds, because the waistline was just beneath her bust and therefore the rounding in front didn't need to be corseted in uncomfortably; but a quick brush of Howl's hand down her back had her dress's hemline raising a couple of feet to bare her knees.

She would have protested his inexplicable overfondness for baring her legs to all the world if she wasn't vastly more interested in getting them away from anywhere the Kingsbury door could be knocked upon and they could hear it; so she seized her husband by the elbow and all but dragged him off into Trehaven's morning.


End file.
